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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What horrified Richard Wright in Gilroy's account?
(a) Whites identifying with his black characters.
(b) Blacks criticizing his characters.
(c) The history of blacks in America.
(d) Europeans taking his books as true indications of life in America.

2. What does Gilroy associate racial traditions with?
(a) Postmodernity.
(b) Syncretic modernity.
(c) International modernism.
(d) Pre-modernity.

3. What does Gilroy say Richard Wright was ambivalent to?
(a) Reconciliation with white culture.
(b) Harmonious coexistence with dominant culture.
(c) Assimilation.
(d) A closed racial community.

4. Who does Gilroy say DuBois was analyzing in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) American blacks.
(b) The black Atlantic.
(c) African blacks.
(d) Post-slavery peoples.

5. What are blacks asked to remember instead of slavery?
(a) Their ongoing cultural pride.
(b) The benefits of Western progress.
(c) Their salvation from tribal existence.
(d) Black civilization.

6. What conflict was taking up too much space in the discussion of race in American literature according to Richard Wright?
(a) The conflict between young and old.
(b) The conflict between man and technology.
(c) The conflict between owners and workers.
(d) The conflict between men and women.

7. What is the first period of black history, according to DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) Exile from home.
(b) Acceptance of slavery.
(c) Liberation from slavery.
(d) Surviving the leap to modernism.

8. How does Gilroy say that Richard Wright saw capitalism?
(a) As a destructive war.
(b) As a form of liberation theology.
(c) As a great liberator.
(d) As a messianic religion.

9. What is the last period of black history, according to DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) Black music.
(b) Returning to Africa.
(c) Political autonomy.
(d) Black self-reliance.

10. What kinds of frameworks was DuBois trying to look beyond?
(a) Essentialist.
(b) Pluralist.
(c) Relativist.
(d) Monotheist.

11. Cornel West used DuBois' work as a solution to a crisis in what?
(a) American pragmatism.
(b) American literature.
(c) Confidence in modernism.
(d) International Marxism.

12. What does Gilroy say is the only way to deal with the history of slavery?
(a) To look it in the face.
(b) To dig into the past to find a personal origin in it.
(c) To try to hide the past away.
(d) To live with what is in the present.

13. What are the two parts of the double consciousness Gilroy describes?
(a) Politics of fulfillment and politics of transformation.
(b) Politics of subordination and politics of emancipation.
(c) Self-aware intellect and blind impulses and urges.
(d) Primitive culture and modern culture.

14. What does Gilroy say modernism relies on?
(a) A sense of transformation, and an evolution from the past.
(b) A sense of justice, and a development of political institutions.
(c) A sense of progress, and a continuity with the past.
(d) A sense of time and a break with the past.

15. Why has the analysis of Wright's work been impoverished according to Gilroy?
(a) Because he has been misinterpreted.
(b) Because Wright was so ambivalent in his writing.
(c) Because he was pigeon-holed as a sexist.
(d) Because he moved away from the U.S.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Gilroy say Afrocentrism is really?

2. What are yearning and mourning associated with in black culture according to Gilroy?

3. What feeling did DuBois see in the culture of diaspora blacks?

4. What ontological state does Gilroy say is the heart of many stories in black culture?

5. What is the role of tradition in black culture according to Gilroy?

(see the answer keys)

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